CHEMIMECHANICAL POLISHING APPARATUS AND ITS CONTROL METHOD

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a control method for a chemimechanical polishing apparatus which can measure an accurate thickness and is easily applicable to existent equipment and to provide the chemimechanical polishing apparatus.

SOLUTION: Prepared is a detected light quantity table for an end-point detection part by a polishing process recipe of a polished layer of a semiconductor wafer (S202). The polishing process recipe of the polished layer is inputted (S204) and the semiconductor wafer is irradiated with light from the end-point detection part to detect the quantity of light reflected by the polished layer (S206). The thickness of the polished layer before polishing is detected from a detection signal based upon the detected quantity of light by reference to the detected light quantity table (S208) and a polishing time up to a target thickness is calculated from the calculated thickness of the polished layer before polishing (S210). An end point is detected (S212) by counting down the calculated polishing time while the polished layer is polished and once the end point is detected, the polishing operation is stopped (S214).

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